February 06, 2013

Virgin Media Q4 and full year 2012 results

Virgin Media has published its latest results. The headlines:• Cable revenue up 3.0% for the year; up 3.8% in the quarter− Net cable customer additions of 88,700 in the year, 42,700 in the quarter− Cable ARPU up 2.1% to £48.87 in the quarter• On-going improvement of customer base mix in the quarter− TiVo customers increased 896,900 in the year, 187,300 in the quarter− Paying TV customers3 increased 210,000 in the year, 59,900 in the quarter− Superfast broadband customers (30Mb and above) increased 1.5m in the year, 419,400 in the quarter.

Here's the TV piece from the press release:

Strong demand for superfast broadband and TiVoA year ago we introduced new product “Collections” which included superfast broadband, TiVo and HD TV as standard. These were created to meet increasingly widespread consumer demand for better connectivity and next generation entertainment by further differentiating our products from those of our competitors.During 2012, the number of customers on superfast speeds (30Mb and above) increased by 1.5m, including 419,400 during the last quarter, taking the total to 2.176m or 51% of our broadband base. Total broadband net additions in the year were 169,300, with 62,700 in the quarter compared to 30,000 a year ago.Demand for even faster speeds remains strong with around 41% of new broadband subscribers taking speeds of 60Mb or higher during Q4. Our programme to double the broadband speeds of over 4m customers is on track with 76% of our network upgraded for the new faster speeds.At the same time, the recognized appeal of our TiVo service is driving pay TV growth. We added 896,900 more TiVo customers during 2012, including 187,300 in the fourth quarter to reach a total of 1.33m or 35% of our TV customer base. This uptake has helped to drive the overall number of paying TV customers, which increased by 210,000 in the year, including 59,900 in the final quarter.We launched our Virgin TV Anywhere service towards the end of the year which allows our TV customers to stream up to 45 live channels to tablets and smartphones, with even more content available online, including thousands of hours of on demand programming. It also allows Virgin Media TiVo customers to connect to their TiVo boxes to manage their recordings wherever they are.We continue to add more TV content to all our entertainment services. After the period end, we introduced two further HD channels from Turner Broadcasting, bolstering the total number of HD channels available to our customers to 39.